Thugs Attack Federal Judges!No, we’re not talking
about the judge shot in Atlanta or the murder of a judge’s family in
Chicago. The judiciary in America is being mugged by Republican zealots on
Capitol Hill, led by their very own monsta rappas, Tom DeLay and John Cornyn.by James Charles
www.dissidentvoice.org
April 12, 2005

For
mere mortals, threatening a judge is a federal offense, punishable by a
fine, imprisonment or both. But, apparently the same rules don’t apply if
you’re Tom DeLay or a Republican member of the United States Senate.

Mrs.
Terri Schiavo’s body had barely been removed from her hospice when the House
majority leader ominously warned a corridor scrum of reporters that "the
time will come" when the federal judges who refused to become involved in
the Republican’s gruesome game of deathbed politics would “answer for their
behavior.” Mr. DeLay may not have realized what interesting company he was
keeping by becoming the latest in a long line of prominent world figures
going back as far as Torquemada and, in more modern times, includes
prominent politicians such as Josef Goebbels, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin and
countless Asian, African and Latin American despots, to demand that the
judiciary bow to the will of political and religious zealots.

Interestingly, since Mr. DeLay seemed to be including judges appointed by
flaming liberals such as Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush in his wrath,
apparently his litmus test is not that a judge merely be a conservative or a
Republican to escape punishment on the rack. Rather, to his mind, any judge
risks being drawn and quartered who is not a docile political fool who will
put their imprimatur on every ill-conceived, idiotic or unconstitutional
piece of legislation that Congress or a state legislature decides to pass.

Far from
being embarrassed by Mr. DeLay’s frightening outburst, on
April 4, 2005 he was
joined by Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican and member of the
Judiciary Committee which is charged with protecting the Constitution and
its guarantee of an independent judiciary. Standing on the Senate floor,
Sen. Cornyn linked the recent courthouse murder of an Atlanta judge by a
career criminal desperate to escape another trial, and the Chicago judge
whose mother and husband were killed execution style by a paranoid
delusional who went amok after having his frivolous lawsuit dismissed, with
judges who frustrate the public by “making political decisions” that results
in a growing anger.

Apparently, Sen. Cornyn, who -- like Attorney General Alberto Gonzales --
was a Texas Supreme Court judge before being elected to the Senate, thinks
that two sociopaths reflect American values. Worse, by his very words, the
Senator reveals that not only does he not understand American values, he has
no knowledge of the Constitution in which the framers quite deliberately
created three branches of government so each could watch over the other two.
For good measure, they ensured that federal judges are appointed for life to
prevent political interference in their deliberations.

Oh,
wait; it must be my mistake. My education went terribly awry somewhere along
the line. Sen. Cornyn thumbs his nose at the notion of separation of powers.
In his world, the Supreme Court should be “an enforcer of political
decisions made by elected representatives of the people.”

Not only
does the current mob in
Washington sneer at checks and balances,
they have a unique reading of something they think is in the Constitution.
At university, I took a graduate seminar on the Constitution and have
absolutely no recollection of Cornyn’s fascinating concept being part of
either the document we studied or the spirited dialogue we had in class. We
did have several two hour, freewheeling discussions during that warm spring
too many years ago on the court’s role in preventing what the professor
called “the tyranny of the majority.” Apparently, the 190,000-odd
last-minute
Ohio voters in November who gave the
state and thus the presidency to George W. Bush again intended for that
archaic concept to be eliminated from public policy.

There
was a time when comments like Mr. DeLay’s and Mr. Cornyn’s came only from
extreme elements of the lunatic fringe. They were found in crumpled John
Birch Society pamphlets, and on hand-printed sandwich boards carried by men
who hadn’t shaved in a few days and wore frayed shirts and old, scuffed
shoes as they marched back-and-forth every afternoon in front of the court
house downtown. People snickered at them as they walked by. Now, the same
words are being uttered by powerful men in the halls of Congress and go
unchallenged by colleagues and reporters alike.

We could
snicker at DeLay, Cornyn & Company, too, except they’re deadly serious.
Unlike the sad old man who paraded in front of the county court house back
home, they are in a position to put their words into action.

The
threat of eliminating filibusters as a tool to block Pres. Bush’s worst
judicial appointments -- the so-called “nuclear option” -- is the first
likely test of whether the far right has enough power in the Senate to
implement the fringe components of its agenda. The answer will lie with
moderate Republicans, who will have to muster tremendous political courage
to go against a leadership that has shown in previous elections it’s not
above working to defeat a Republican incumbent it doesn’t like. But it also
is the responsibility of Senate Democrats to hold fast, so that Republicans
who might vote with them won’t have their votes wasted even as they risk
their political careers being threatened by their own party.

Meanwhile, it is likely that judges will be subjected to more muggings every
time a court hands down a decision that the political thugs on the far right
don’t like. After all, their gang leader living over in that big white house
at the other end of the street abrogates international treaties, disregards
international law, blurs the clear Constitutional separation of church and
state and tramples civil liberties is setting an example for his home boyz
to follow.

There is
a bright side, though.

It is
the realization that perhaps Mr. DeLay, Dr. Frist, Sen. Cornyn and their
fellow heavies in Congress might be living proof of the old adage that half
the people in the country who went to university graduated in the bottom 50%
of their class. It only becomes scary when some of them get elected to
public office.

James Charles is a writer living in
Toronto. His next book is Life In The Dominion: An Ex-Pat American’s
Affectionate Look At Living In Canada. Reach him by e-mail at:
TheCurmudgeon382@hotmail.com.